


No Wings

by kriegy (oldbosie)



Category: Borderlands
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 18:06:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3218444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oldbosie/pseuds/kriegy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maya and Lilith experiment with Eridium in Sanctuary while Roland is away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Wings

Maya doesn’t mean it. She never does.

  
“You know what I should do,” she’d said, like her mouth was full of ash, like cinders lifted from the conflagration had bored white cankers in her tongue. Like if she’d taken her two little fingers and pulled away the wet red lip her teeth would be coaled with the soot of her snarl. “I should make a fist and burn the body up. I should weal it over with acid and grind it to the bone. They used to burn witches like us. These days burning is anybody’s game. I should break the teeth on hard apples, stomp the head to make it stay. Strip a stick for a spit and have myself a suckling skag barbecue.”

  
“Burning is anybody’s game,” she says again, and props her knuckles on the cot frame, and hangs her head, and rows her shoulders through the narrow shirt that shuffles barely over their broad beaching. It is strained through to the thread, and has given up stretching over her tough torso. Now it sighs away from her in awkward gaps and clings translucent over bulky sinews. She is hefty and elongate as a hornet, those formidable shoulders winging irritably on either side. She shifts her shirt across them for its threatening effect and rears herself upright. She scrapes six foot with the cornflower cowlick sticking askew from the back of her skull.

  
“How’re we doing, My? You sound…not good.”

  
Maya sucks her lip across her teeth for that characteristic click of contempt, rocks her head aside. Somehow, that’s more articulate than the raving—sharper, more alert. Lilith’s apprehension slackens like a muscle in her chest.

  
She’s been sat on Roland’s pillow for almost an hour, now, knees flung wide to flank her little body, watching Maya move. The room is small—the vault hunter has jabbed pushups at its flaking floor, tugged her strained arms straight against a crackling of “wanted” posters, flattened palms upon its sway-backed ceiling.

  
“Just het up,” Maya says. “I didn’t mean it. You know how it gets. Been running with Blood Boy too long, probably.” By this she means Krieg. Lilith doesn’t say it, but she thinks that maybe they’ve all been running with blood boy a touch too long, since before the Psycho even entered the picture.

  
“You’ve been het up for fifty minutes. You sure you don’t want some air?”

  
Lilith frowns when her suggestion is met with an exasperated growl.

  
“Okay, what the hell’s up with you? You’re too tetchy for this right now, just go kill something!” If you’re gonna buzz by the window like some angry insect, expect to get swatted at.

  
Maya stretches her eye sockets with scorched fingertips.

  
“Gaige has my guns.” I don’t want to leave.

  
“So ask for them back! Seriously, My, you’re kinda driving me up a wall here.” That shirt is too tight.

  
It flexes like a tendon. With every tug, every slight contortion of a limb or ligament, it's pulled gauzy as crushed safety glass. Barely there at all. It used to be a loaner from the kid, a former fixture of an adolescent mechanic's tinkering regime, retired to a vault hunter’s erratic crashing and conditioning — until Gaige caught Maya slipping out of it one morning in Moxxi’s cracked vinyl booths, in that forty-minute interval between closing time and sunrise. Maya’s elbows had been spread across the table, her mouth hung horrendously ajar, head shaking side to side with every shove of some man’s red-faced ministrations. She saw the girl from across the dark canteen, metal arm thrust impishly behind the bar — instead of balking in embarrassment, Maya merely narrowed her eyes, black rings around them rubbed blurry by the night, and nipped the corner of her lip into a cool, wry smile. Perspiration spread across the old shirt’s weathered whiteness like toppled engine oil. A giant grubby hand reached up beyond its hem and crudely plucked out a heavy, tattooed breast.

  
Gaige had shrugged and carried on stealing her forty of rakk ale. Everyone fucked Axton now and again. It happened to the best of them. She had even harbored her suspicions about Deathtrap, having taught the bot a thing or two after Marcy mercilessly dumped her. Nonetheless, she couldn’t bring herself to take back the shirt. Perhaps it had been the snaking course of Axton’s hand along its tight interior, leaving a perceptible trail; or else the clammy jostling of Maya’s chest that filled the fabric brimmingly, in ways Gaige never had, with every pushing from the guy who dragged her hips.

  
Either way, the thin-worn thing had been condemned to strain across the siren’s tits for the rest of its dwindling days. This is what it does now, ever more tenuously, as Maya’s fidgeting erodes the room in her feeble attempts at patience.

  
“It’s not going to work, Maya. You’ve had three hits, and nothing’s happened. You knew you didn’t have a reaction before we tried this.”

  
Maya rubs the chalky violet scum off of her palm, wiping it low on the inside of her thigh for what has to be the thousandth time. It’s clinging to her fingers, like some internal force is beckoning but cannot breach the resistance offered by the barrier of her skin.

  
Eridium has never worked on her. Her body won’t even accept it. When she applies herself to its refractive edges it will sublimate in light, but there’s no uptake, no magical assimilation. All that’s left is slag burning welts in her hands.

  
“It’s okay,” says Lilith, not so much soothingly as warily. “It’s pretty obvious you don’t need the stuff to be a total killer. Besides, Eridium can mess a person up pretty bad. The way I see it? You got off easy.”

  
A tiny “hmph” and a wingish flutter of those giant black lashes.  Lilith stands up, letting Roland’s pillow swallow up the crater she’s impressed upon its middle. She sounds tired and agitated all at once, as if her insides knock themselves impatiently against the brittle shell of her skin, humming, incensed—no time for weariness, no time.

  
“Just go run around or something. Work it out of your system. Exploding some things with your brain should remind you not to worry about artificially enhancing your freakish superpowers.”

  
“I don’t want to leave.”

  
“Well, I—you—your shirt is too tight!”

  
There it is. And there’s the stupid shirt,  a ribbed white piece of threadbare filth, hems unraveled, sleeves mere meek suggestions protruding over the collarbones’ ends. Hard hips jut naked from its too-short termination. Only its transparent tightness holds her tits in place, crushing utility bra forsaken in this period of restless respite, of waiting for the man. ( _He’ll be back_ , said Lilith’s thighs pushed down upon his bedclothes, but her fingers clawing through the covers countered, _He’d goddamn better be._ )

  
“What?” says Maya, feigning strained attention.

  
“That shirt? Way too tight. Now, normally, I’d—it’s just, you’re pretty, ah, exposed there.”

  
Maya sits against the glassless windowsill and pretends to look at Lilith blankly, eyes sunk half shut in lazy interest at Lilith’s tactful floundering.

  
“I mean, not to say—but your, um—oof—what was I…?”

  
Maya has stopped fidgeting. She looks almost bored—or would, if not for the glitter in her glacial eyes, irises more white than blue.

  
“About my tits?”

  
Lilith colors crimson.

  
“It’s like a second pair of eyes, My. You wearing that thing around, it…”

  
Maya is laughing, a low, ferocious, guttural sound.

  
“Aw,” she says. Lilith almost quails — there is no humor in Maya’s voice, in Maya’s towering figure as she obstructs the street below with a cross-armed silhouette. Instead, she sets her hands on her hips indignantly. _The nerve_ , she decides to think, _the gall of this fucking rookie_ , rather than _Jesus, she’s a giant_ , or _Jesus, she could snap me like a twig,_ or _Jesus—what if I kind of want her to?_

  
Maya pulls herself closer to Lilith, a shadow, until her head leans on a stuck-out neck toward the smaller creature, craned slightly to one side in the combined provocation of threat and invitation. This what they call a dare, when it is two children crammed into a stale-smelling closet on the eve of someone’s thirteenth birthday—but it assumes an altogether different meaning when two galactic armageddons crammed inside two svelte white stacks of walking meat are squared off in a tiny room. Particularly when one is painfully aware that the other’s scarcely-covered breasts, rising slowly and deflating with the tide, flat nipples peering brownly from its narrow knit, are at eye level.

  
Lilith forces herself to look into Maya’s sneer,  chin tugged out toward her in a mortified attempt to stand her ground.  She nearly forgets how close they’ve been these past few weeks, how breathtaking Maya has seemed, how fun and loud and icily vindictive. Their faces are close now but it is a different kind of closeness. A threat and an invitation. A dare.

  
“How ‘bout it,  Lil? Blow off some steam?” _You chicken, Firehawk?_ her voice seems to say. It is bizarrely childish of her. She knows Lilith too well for this bullshit. Something’s gotten into her, something bleary and violent, anger strained over a body burst across with brawn and buxomness, a shirt too often worn. Lilith can feel it radiating off her like the unseen heat of sunlight in the earth.

  
Dare ya.

  
Not about to be shown up by this blue-haired baby vault hunter, Lilith nearly throws out Maya’s back dragging her into an involuntary bow, arm flung over her outstretched neck, pulling her down to smash a kiss against her face.

  
“Hah!”

  
Lilith’s knees give a little under her and Maya follows at a crouch, cackling coarsely, cups her hand round Lilith’s leg to lift her scrambling up. Now those knees dig Maya’s hips, the tall blue girl grabbing liberally, keeping Lilith three feet off the floor with a death grip on her inseam. She keeps curling her busied lips away into a feral, toothy laugh. Makeup mingles; Lilith watches lipstick red and blue pulp into bruisy purple on their chins with a giggle she only wishes were unlike her. All sticky and sour in the manner of ill-fed mouths.

  
She likes this. She likes the foolishness of it. She likes the feel of Maya’s massiveness between her thighs, the strong, weatherproof body that reminds her of what it was like to sleep under the stars, young and wild and hard and full of hopeful wrath. All this, Eridium, New Haven, spending months defending Three Horns single-handedly—that can mess a person up pretty bad. And it has. Lilith is skinnier, now. She notices a tremor if the interval between powerups extends beyond a couple hours. Fighting saps her. She flinches at the thought. She’s only thirty-two.

  
Glowering hungrily, Maya wheels around and drives Lilith down on Roland’s unmade bed. There is a great metallic creak as their bodies bob together for a moment, synchronized by the springs’ steely swinging, Maya’s hands planted firmly in the mattress. Maya ducks and browses at the low-feathered hairs curling close and white like hoarfrost under Lilith’s ear, teasing out a tiny groan. Maya knees her way into the fork of Lilith’s legs, pressing pointedly with the top of her thigh.

  
A grating sigh.

  
“I need—”

  
Maya muffled in the bone stacked over Lilith’s thumping heart. For someone always on the move, she’s out of breath so soon. Her words are drawn out, pulled apart between nudges of the lip and tongue.

  
“Yeah, Lil. Yeah, what d’you need?” Lilith feels it in her lungs more clearly than she hears it. There’s a sort of ringing in her ears. The rhythmic, tacky touch of kissing keeps the hunger sharp along the edges, but its center has been softened in a blur of starveling want, a faint white enervation that has less to do with Maya’s mouth than Lilith might have hoped. “Tell me what you need.”

  
“Ungh, yeah, could I, um—can you give me one second?”

  
Maya pushes herself back on sand-shredded elbows. There’s a slow, dazed surprise in her gaze, as if she has been roused from half-sleeping by a stranger. She tucks away her feral grin and frowns in somber hesitation.

  
“Everything okay, Lil?”

  
Lilith seems to twitch across the room like an insect over wind-worried branches, weightless and unsteadily mechanical. Her hands comb strongboxes and moneybags, closing over cobwebbed corners, coming up light and trembling and unladen. Rummaging away the silent glow of all their coupled huffing, scattering the moment with the careless clanging of discarded artifacts, searching, swearing. Maya is sure her narrowed eyes can be felt against the sheet-scuffed skin of Lilith’s back.

  
“Junkie.” She does not forget to angle the word wryly in her jaw.

  
“Says the chick who emptied out my stash.”

  
There is a strain in Lilith’s voice that straightens the sardonicism with a painful little tug.

  
“Listen, My,” she says, turning. “I need—I can’t, um—I won’t be able to do this without—”

  
Maya stares blankly, and Lilith colors, feeling every aching want there is pinch at every nerve until she is a stiff, still paralytic propped against the shelves and crates. Yet somehow, Lilith feels as if the misapprehending gaze has missed her by an mile; the blushing doesn’t seem to register, no humiliated flash reflected in those cool white eyes, until the crystalline focus of realization freezes them over.

  
“There’s some on me,” says Maya softly.

  
Lilith turns her head.

  
“Come again?”

  
“There’s some on me,” Maya repeats. “In me, all over me. Every part of me. I’m saturated with the shit. I’ve been pounding E for hours, Lil. It hasn’t made me any awesomer, but it’s here—” Maya holds her palm a half-inch from her gut, as if feeling out the edges of an unseen glow, something that extends across the surface of her skin, envelops her where she lies balanced on a crooked arm, all hips and shoulders and a sack of sinews slung between. “I can feel it. It’s energy, it’s power I can’t use, just wandering around, cramping at me, nowhere to go, that’s what it’s been — ”

  
Slowly, Maya extends her length across the room, from Roland’s mattress to the stacks where Lilith stands, proffering giant upturned hands with skin all dark and cyanotic from the rejected residues of slag.

  
“What, you want to—” Lilith flicks a look at Maya’s shaded face. “You want to _give it back?_ ”

  
The sleepy smile again.

  
“I want you to take it from me.”

  
Lilith lunges. There is no need of a second invitation. She bears the giant girl down on the littered floor and it’s a punch that has Maya gripping air between her teeth, trying to catch the breath before it leaves her lungs, holding her head off the ground by clinging to the small thing bowed above her. Her elbow hangs on Lilith’s neck as Lilith burns and burrows in her body, knees nudged into knees, hands crawling into dark spaces between arm and side, thigh and thigh. The kiss has not come back to her.

  
Maya seizes Lilith’s chin between her lips and tugs her closer, tonguing softly to a red-mouthed laughing sound as Lilith pushes her back flat against the ground and follows full force with her face, her feather weight. Her breathing roars in Maya’s ears, scorches her shoulders through that unendurable shirt—

  
Lilith lifts her chest from where it pressed at Maya’s throat to drag the tight white tatters off at last. Maya’s body shines beneath it, wet and steaming, tattoos wormed across her breasts, her belly, all hard and mineral. She is impermeable. Lilith lips along her in search of pores, pokes between her ribs with tooth and tongue; grazes for a trace of violet, comes up with a mouth full of salt, the sea, the groan of a girl at her wit’s end.

  
“This is—stupid—” She’s panting through Maya’s hair, breath tickled blue. Maya laughs at her, back bridged inches from the floor, tracing lines of dust with her toes. “Not working—not enough—”

  
“Try harder!”

  
Maya holds up Lilith’s hips to let her sit against her lap. The look on Lilith’s face is wild. Maya keeps laughing.

  
“It’s on your hands—your hands, you have to—”

  
Her jaw nudges its way into Maya’s palm. A purple flush flares fleetingly between them, sublimating fast and hanging as a sting of hot relief in Lilith’s cheek. Lilith’s eyes sink shut as if she might prevent the light from rushing out again, as if it were transmitted through the senses, her silence the only insulation—

  
“Oh, fuck — oh, _finally_ —”

  
“More where that came from.”

  
Lilith raises her arms to let Maya coax her from her shirt. She’s slashed through with ribs, pulse ticking palpably in a translucent chest branched over with silver veins, scar-colored tattoos. Her breasts sit stiffly in the mark-riddled narrowness of her body, small and pink-peaked, gleaming with goosebumps, riding the rise and fall of heavy breathing. Maya shuffles her palm between them, slides a purple trail from navel to collarbone, presses slag against exposed blood vessels. Lilith sighs, the color teasing back into her skin. Maya grins and reddens Lilith’s nipple with a canine tooth.

  
“Okay,” Lilith says,  recovering herself around the words. “Okay, all of it, now.”

  
Maya heaves Lilith off her chest and tumbles both of them the extra feet toward Roland’s bed. She bites down on Lilith’s belt, almost breaks her jaw when they bounce bodily together. She must let go to laugh. She extracts Lil’s bony hips from the rakish shreds of clothes she has been wearing long before Maya came here. Bare legs tread familiar sheets.

  
Maya sinks her hand sidelong down the lowest curve of Lilith’s belly, down past all protruding skin and bone until she feels her hot, slick, yielding. Lilith reflexes toward the palm that flattens over her — Maya extends her fingers, curls them, retracts, retraces. When Maya’s nails scrape soft and shallow just inside her, Lilith hisses; when Maya’s thumb stretches through forgiving flesh to tug against her clit, Lilith makes a gentle nasal sound and snags at Maya’s back, tattoos brightening. Maya’s other hand is up across her face, moistened in Lilith’s mouth, tongued over for traces of Eridium, pressing, disfiguring.

  
“More,” murmurs Lilith through Maya’s shadow as it falls across her; Maya interprets this freely, knuckling deeper against the convulsive twitch of Lilith’s body underneath her, thumb driving circles into tender skin. She can feel Lilith swelling, getting raw. Everything is dark and bright and ripe and bursts in stars in Maya’s eyes. If she looks away she loses the tilt of the room and has to right herself with her hands; her dizzy clinging gets an approving groan.

  
“I need you to f—”

  
Before the words are out, Maya is fucking, driving Lilith back into the headboard with three fingers; every dig a rush of daylight, a burst of sun and sound and Lilith moans and flashes, her tattoos flaring white in perfect time. Maya rocks onto her knees to angle her whole body at Lilith’s narrow hips, throwing with her powerful shoulder, tendons flexing at the elbow. Lilith leans her forehead into Maya’s throat with a sobbing gasp. Maya can feel the searing trails in Lilith’s skin, a light that glares more brightly by the minute — a mental image makes her laugh aloud.

  
“Hey,” Maya mutters, mouth filled with the sweet oily smell of Lilith’s scalp. She can barely speak for all her grinning and straining. When the thrusting slows, Lilith butts sharp knees painfully into her chest.

  
“Don’t stop, damn it!”

  
Maya chuckles.

  
“Hey, when you come — ”

  
“Hey, not happening if you’re gonna just quit—!”

  
“Sorry!” Maya struggles to regain her focus, reestablish rhythm. Her palm cramps; she swears and tries again until Lilith’s grunting quietly with every stroke. The tattoos beam again, and this time Maya cannot suppress her grin.

  
“—when you come, will you do the wings?”

  
Lilith is speechless for a moment. Maya gives her g-spot a little shove for encouragement, and smirks when her response is preceded by a breathless shriek.

  
“I—ungh—I should liquefy you just for fucking saying that.”

  
Maya laughs so hard her hand goes slack. Lilith kicks her again.

  
“Just curious.”

  
“Shut up and screw me.”

  
Maya smirks one last time and lets it go. She can feel the excess Eridium aching to escape; every charge she mounts at Lilith is a precious synaptic relief, every bit of Lilith’s body straining toward satiety.

  
She drags her fingers long and hard through the tough nerves that constrict around them, kisses coarsely along Lilith’s drumming belly, pins Lilith with her mouth fixed fast over her chest. Lilith has stopped her arcing and clawing, even her reflexive gasps; she leans against the bed with flexing feet and knees thrown out, eyes closed, shuddering through flared nostrils, lips gnawed into nonbeing. She seems to be suspended imperceptibly above the sheets, between the ebb and flux that knock her roughly on the cot’s steel rocks. Maya feels a hand rustling down the nape of her neck, hears a heartbeat from somewhere warm and near, courses forward harder with its every pulse. One — _two_ —

  
“Do the wings, Lil.”

  
She couldn’t help it.

  
“Maya—I— _oh, fuck_ —My, I swear to God, I’ll—”

  
This time, Maya doesn’t make the mistake of slowing down.

  
“What’s that, Lil? You gotta — hmph— speak up—”

  
As if anything could be heard over the creaking springs, as if a real exchange were even possible with Lilith’s mouth full of moans, with Maya’s full of Lilith’s flushed red breastbone.

  
“I’m gonna k—I’m— _huh_ —”

  
Lilith closes over Maya’s hand so violently the latter flinches in spite of herself; the exhausted ache unravels over Maya’s wrist. Lilith’s limbs untangle as she seems to spread across the entire mattress, sinking spent into the sheets, almost disappearing. Her belly still throbs after she has lifted herself from Maya’s grasp; her fingers still twitch delightedly in tousled scarlet hair.

  
Any moment, she will roll onto her side to pluck Maya’s too-tight, too-translucent t-shirt, crumpled and discarded, from the filthy floor.

  
Maya will stretch out beside her, nursing sore and sticky fingers, nosing the metallic stink of sex from Lilith’s damp throat, smiling triumphantly.

  
“No wings? Seriously?”

  
“I’m gonna kill you,” Lilith will finally sigh, and muffle her laughter in a brimming handful of Maya’s old white shirt.

  
She won’t mean it. She never does.  
  
  
  



End file.
